2014-01-15

The grand Windows vs Linux fight

A lot of muggles are convinced there is some big battle going on between Microsoft and Linux. They are wrong.

Truth is that only a minority of very noisy wannabe-Linux users see this as a fight. I imagine this loud minority as people who once installed Ubuntu but actually spend most of their time playing games on Windows.

The reality is that most organizations use Microsoft on the Desktop and a lot of them also have one or more products like MS Active Directory, MS Exchange or MS Sharepoint.

But every other computer runs a form of Unix, very often this is Linux:
- the millions of servers from Facebook, Google, Twitter, ...
- millions of DSL modems
- more than a billion Android phones
- 98 percent of the 500 largest supercomputers in the world
- Lego robots
- space station laptops
- (in Belgium specifically stuff like the bbox and digibox etc)
- tablets, routers, firewalls, NAS devices (aka "external harddisks"), stock exchanges, radar control, gps navigation and much more

There was no battle, there is no fight, there will never be a Linux vs Windows. They are just different things, Microsoft is used for end user intranet, Linux for servers and all other devices.